Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/85

 they held "regnator omnium Deus, cetera subjecta atque parentia;" and, in chapter 9., "ceterum nec cohibere parietibus Deos, neque in ullam humani oris speciem assimilare ex magnitudine cœlestium arbitrantur." The polytheism of the ancient Romans, and the saint worship of the Christian church of Rome, and probably the infirmity of the human mind and language requiring, in an uncultivated state, material forms to represent abstract ideas, had in the course of ten centuries, between Tacitus and Sæmund, undoubtedly mingled with and moulded the forms and ideas of the original religion of this race. Idolatry, in every shape and country, is the result of a struggle of the human mind to attain fixed ideas in religion. It is universal at a certain stage of the development of the intellectual powers of man, because that stage is as necessary to be passed through as infancy in the individual, or barbarism in a society of human beings. A love for religious certainty and truth is at the bottom even of the grossest idolatry, if we analyse it rightly. Idolatry is an attempt to individualise the conception of Almighty power, under a strong sense of its existence—to make it more possible, or more easy for the mind, in a certain stage of development, to dwell upon and entertain some present conception of that power. Idols should be considered by the Christian philosopher as the imperfect words of a much more pure religious sentiment than our churchmen generally suppose—words different, indeed, from spoken or written words, but intended to convey the same conception, and used with the same sentiment by the ignorant idolater as the most poetic imagery and most eloquent language of our pulpit orator. The most absurd idols of the Hindu or the South Sea islander, sent home to the museum of the Missionary Society as memorials of the spiritual blindness of the heathens at this day—idols with four or five arms